Post 4 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). A central claim of the book is that recognition of the challenge of brain complexity — how it places pressure on scientists to devise experimental methods, theories and models, which drastically cut down the apparent …
Commentary from Carrie Figdor on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). The animating idea of Chirimuuta’s book is that science, and neuroscience in particular, must engage in simplification in order to explain a complex world. The epistemic dangers of taking the outcomes of simplification strategies …
Post 3 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). In the previous post I described how the literal interpretation of neurocomputational models encourages us to attend only to the perceived commonalities between brains and computers and to relegate the differences to the periphery of …
Commentary from Mark Sprevak on today’s post from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (MIT Press). I very much agree with the book’s main claim that abstraction and simplification are essential theoretical virtues in the cognitive and brain sciences. Often a simple model – one good enough for our specific …
Post 2 of 5 from Mazviita Chirimuuta on The Brain Abstracted (Open Access: MIT Press). The idea in my project to foreground the question of interpretation is loosely inspired by work in the philosophy of physics which takes the empirical success of e.g. quantum field theory for granted but debates …
This week the Brains Blog is hosting a symposium on Mazviita Chirimuuta’s new book The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (Open Access: MIT Press). Today’s post from Chirimuuta provides a precis and overview of the content of the book. Through this week, we will have …
(See all posts in this series here.) I conclude with Chapters 6 and 7 of the book, which apply the theory to reasoning and introspecting consciousness. Investigating these as forms of attending, mental actions, illuminates. Chp. 6 examines deducing a conclusion from the premises that entail it. Given that every …
